Tag Archives: Caribbean Wind

This is not a “best from 1981” list, just 5 Great songs Bob Dylan recorded in 1981.

Angelina

How to comment on this extraordinary piece of writing? Recorded at the ‘Shot of Love’ sessions of April-May 1980, Angelina is unlike anything else Bob Dylan has ever written – part Cocteau film, part Braque painting, totally surreal, it defies logic and heads off for the deepest, darkest parts of poetic mystery. Though Dylan has never commented about the song in public, chances are that he’d confess that it was as much mystery to him as to anyone else.
~John Bauldie (TBS1-3 booklet)

“I couldn’t quite grasp what [‘Caribbean Wind’] was about, after I finished it. Sometimes you write something to be very inspired, and you won’t quite finish it for one reason or another. Then you’ll go back and try and pick it up, and the inspiration is just gone. Either you get it all, and you can leave a few little pieces to fill in, or you’re trying always to finish it off. Then it’s a struggle. The inspiration’s gone and you can’t remember why you started it in the first place. Frustration sets in.”
– Dylan, to Cameron Crowe

..He spoke of one song he was particularly proud of, that he’d written “a while back,” that successfully functioned on the level of complexity of his mid-sixties material, taking the listener outside of time.. He said the song was called “Caribbean Wind”.
~Bob Dylan (to Paul Williams Nov 1980)

@ #35 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. We got 3 versions of this brilliant song.. the best is the live versions he played on November 12, 1980.

Well, I just drifted into it, you know. I started singing, writing my own songs some place or somewhere. I always kinda written my own songs but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs; the only person that I ever heard do that was Woody Guthrie. And then one day I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote that I performed in public was the song that I wrote to Woody Guthrie. And I just felt like playing it one night. And I played it.
~Bob Dylan (30 July 1984 – The Bert Kleinman Interview)

This is an ongoing series… I will fill in the holes as I create new posts…